According to many reports, Scandinavian Skype’s co-founder and former chief executive, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, are going to get back the Skype they sold to eBay four years ago for $3.1bn. They may be encouraged by the fact that eBay has just sold StumbleUpon back to its founders, two years after buying it.
It is no secret that eBay has been thinking about offloading Skype – eBay’s sales are starting to slump, and last year it announced plans to cut around 1,000 staff. It also hasn’t been able to integrate Skype as deeply as it planned (boosting sales by letting buyers call sellers directly).
On the other hand, there are plenty of reasons to hold on. Skype now boasts more than 400 million users, and had revenues of $550m last year – largely a result of its 8% share of the world’s international calls. It is also starting to make progress in the mobile world after years of stuttering.
But the question is: why Skype’s former chief executive wanted to get it back?
Pahaps they are romantics which are focusing on the pair’s entrepreneurial egos, their need to see their creation fulfil its potential. But this is rather too emotional reason.
“When the duo sold Skype, they kept control of a crucial technology that underpinned it – a piece of peer-to-peer software that they licensed back to Skype through another company, Joltid. Without Joltid’s technology, Skype’s value is greatly reduced, so eBay is under pressure to settle the case (presumably with better terms for Joltid), or sell Skype. If so, the best price is likely to come from the founders’ consortium – which could, of course, guarantee a deal with Joltid”.